“It will not work,” Sasha said. “She saw no murder taking place, and even if she did, she is a prostitute. Her testimony is worth little. He will not be convicted in any court.”
“Not in court perhaps,” said Iris, “but I can certainly convict him in print. Remember, I have an interview with Pavel in less than two hours. I will put the needle to him and record his confessions.”
“He will kill you,” said Olga.
“No,” said Iris. “I have the police to protect me.”
She patted the hand of Sasha, which rested on the table.
Olga Grinkova tried to pick up her coffee with both hands, but they refused to cooperate. She put the cup back down and said again, “He will kill you.”
Nine police officers, including Iosef Rostnikov and Akardy Zelach, entered the small apartment of Vera Korstov ready for whatever might come from Ivan Medivkin. The blue-uniformed officers, one of them a woman, carried stun guns, electric riot batons, and heavy rubber truncheons. Iosef Rostnikov and Akardy Zelach were unarmed.
Iosef had knocked at the door and announced loudly that the door should be opened immediately. The door had not been opened immediately. Two of the uniformed police threw their shoulders against the door, which opened abruptly with a shattering of wood.
There was no one in the tiny living room/kitchen area and no one in the bedroom. There was, however, a note in small penciled words:
Vera, I cannot stay. It is torture to pace these floors waiting. I am calling someone who will help. It is better you not know who. I will come back to you when this nightmare ends.
“How far can a giant run without being seen?” asked Iosef.
None of the police had an answer.
“Shall we check every apartment in the building?” the highest-ranking of the uniformed police asked.
“Yes,” said Iosef, looking at the note one more time before folding it and tucking it into his jacket pocket.
Armed and very dangerous, the uniformed police hurried out of the apartment.
Iosef and Zelach could hear the high-ranking officer calling out orders for two people to check all exits and entrances from the building and to secure them. The other four began their apartment-by-apartment search while Iosef and Zelach went down the stairwell and out the front door just as one of the policemen was about to secure it.
On the way into the building, they had seen people on the lone patch of green and under the only tree within sight. This was not a day to be enjoying nature. A fast-rushing rivulet of melting slush ran along the curb on both sides of the street.
Iosef and Zelach approached the people, who were all in yellow sweatpants and sweatshirts except for one old Chinese man who appeared to be leading them in some kind of slow-moving dance.
“Have you seen a giant come out of that building this morning?” asked Iosef.
The old man in blue looked ancient now. His head was bald and dotted with meandering blue veins. He was clean-shaven and smiling. He was in the middle of a movement of legs and hands as he gently urged his extended right hand upward, palm forward. The others were mirroring the old man’s moves.
The old man closed his eyes, dropped his hands at his sides, and bowed his head smoothly forward and back.
“A giant?” the man in blue said.
His look was one of incredulity. He turned toward the people in front of him and said, “Have any of you seen a giant?”
They all shook their heads no except for a woman in the group, who said, “Yes,” so softly that it almost escaped without notice.
“You saw the giant?” Iosef asked the woman.
“Yes. He came out of that building.”
She pointed to the building in which Vera Korstov lived.
“Where did he go?” asked Iosef.
“He got into the car that was waiting for him,” the woman said. “Then the car drove off.”
“What kind of car was it?” asked Iosef.
“Blue,” said the old man.
“Green, definitely green,” said another man. “I saw it clearly. One of those little tiny cars.”
“It was a large dark red car with a significant dent in the left rear fender,” said the old man with calm finality.
“Thank you,” Iosef said with only slightly disguised insincerity. “You have been very helpful.”
As he turned to go back to the apartment building to tell the others that a search was unnecessary, he saw Zelach pause, put his feet together, roll his shoulders forward, and place his open palms against each other pointing skyward. Then Zelach bowed his head slowly. All of the sweat-suited people returned the gesture. It was brief. Zelach and the people exchanged a small smile.
As they walked back toward the apartment building, Iosef said, “What was that?”
“The bow is a sign of respect,” said Zelach. “A sign that you are giving up self-importance.”
Iosef shook his head and grinned.
“Akardy Zelach, you are probably the least self-important human I have ever known.”
“It is good to remind oneself.”
“How do you know this?” Iosef asked as they walked.
“My mother and I used to do tai chi exercises three times a week. We did it since I was eight years old. She is not well enough to do it anymore. She insists that I do it without her, but I do it with an empty heart.”
Now they were standing at the curb, more or less where the car had picked up Ivan Medivkin. There was nothing there to see. Iosef looked back at the Chinese man and the others, who had returned to their graceful slow movements. Iosef could not imagine Zelach doing this, but Zelach was not lying. In fact, Akardy Zelach was the worst liar Iosef had ever known.
“Akardy, you are a fountain of confounding information and new revelations. Now if you could only tell me what color that car was …”
“It was a large dark red car,” Zelach said as they stepped onto the sidewalk.
“The Chinese man is the only one who got it right?”
“Yes. He is the only one both focused and seeing everything around him.”
Iosef looked back at the Chinese man. His eyes were closed as he moved his arms and hands gently and brought his left leg slowly forward with his foot not touching the ground.
“He is looking at us now?”
“Yes,” said Zelach.
“With his eyes closed?”
“He senses and sees,” said Zelach, looking across the street at the man about whom they were speaking.
“A red car?” said Iosef.
“Yes,” said Zelach.
“With a dent in the left rear fender?”
“A significant dent,” said Zelach.
“Let us find it.”
“Out all night. I thought you were dead.”
So Lydia Tkach, mother of Sasha, widow of Borislav, shouted at her son when he came through the door of his apartment, which she had moved into with him almost a year ago. She stood, a small stick of a woman with arms folded, looking at him with a reprimand Sasha had known since he was a small child.
“I was working,” he said.
“What?”
Oh God, thought Sasha, she is not wearing her hearing aids.
“I was working. Working,” he shouted.
“At what?” she said, matching the volume of his words.
There was no point in trying to pass on to her the complexity of what had happened. And even if he did, he would certainly not mention that he had gone to bed with the Englishwoman. Lydia Tkach was a bigot. She distrusted anyone who was not Russian and every nation that was not Russia.
“Protecting someone. I have just come home to shower and change clothes.”
“You smell of perfume,” she answered as he moved toward the bedroom. “You should shower and change your clothes.”
Lydia followed him, arms still folded, into the bedroom where he took clean clothing from the closet and bureau drawers.
“Who is this woman of perfume?” she demanded.
> “I must shower and perhaps shave,” he answered as he began to undress.
“She is a flower and a slave?”
“Yes,” said Sasha. “I took her from the harem of a Turkish pasha.”
“She was in a bare room and you took her Turkish kasha? You are going mad or you are trying to make jokes at the expense of your mother.”
Sasha was now wearing only his underpants. He looked at her as he put his thumbs under the elastic. If nothing else would give him respite from his mother, perhaps the sight of his nakedness would force a retreat. He took off his underpants, looking at her as he did so.
“Did she bite you on the thigh? I see a red welt. Did she bite you?”
“No.”
The truth was that he seemed to remember Iris Templeton indeed biting him.
Sasha moved into the tiny bathroom and reached over to turn on the water as he muttered a prayer that he would not have to shave and shower with cold water. He looked over his shoulder at Lydia, who was in the doorway examining his body in search of other violations of his flesh by this woman.
“Mother, leave me in peace for a few minutes.”
“Leave you a piece of what?”
A peace of mind, he said to himself, thanking whatever gods might exist for the hot water he felt with his hand.
“You look like your father,” Lydia shouted without going into a retreat. “He was too skinny like you. You should be in Kiev on your knees begging Maya to come back to Moscow with my grandchildren.”
I have been there and I have done that to no avail, he said to himself as he washed.
“You should not be a policeman,” Lydia cried.
There were few conversations with his mother during the nine years he had been a policeman that she did not show her disapproval of his profession.
“Policemen got shot,” she shouted. “There are crazy people out there. Remember when someone shot Karpo?”
Seven years ago, he thought. That had happened seven years ago and the wound had long since healed.
Sasha shaved.
“I have decided,” she shouted. “I am going to Kiev to convince Maya to come back to Moscow.”
“Good luck,” he shouted.
A visit from their grandmother, who frightened them, would add their voices to a nyet for Moscow and their father.
“Do not use language like that in front of your mother,” she cried out.
Sasha had no idea what distortion of language she had created, and he thought the less he considered it, the better off he would be.
“Soup,” she shouted when he stepped out of the shower and began to dry himself with the blue beach towel he and Maya had bought shortly after they were married. The towel was still soft against his skin.
“Yes,” he said, moving past Lydia and beginning to dress.
“Soup is on the table,” she said.
He nodded, unwilling to engage in conversation that would certainly and creatively be distorted. When he had fully dressed, he moved back into the living room and to the round wooden dinner table near the wall by the kitchen area. On the table was a large bright green cup of soup filled with vegetables and beef and a piece of dark bread next to it on a small plate. The cup was one of five Maya had bought for almost nothing at a stall on the Arbat shortly after Pulcharia was born. Everything, everything in the apartment, was a reminder of his wife and children. She had taken nothing but her clothes and those of the children when she had left.
He sat and drank the warm soup with his mother sitting across from him.
“Good,” he said.
“You are my burden, Sasha,” she said with a shake of her head. “You are my only son, my only child. You should be a comfort and a joy as I grow older. Instead you are out all night with sweet-smelling Polish women and you are killing people with a gun.”
Sasha considered correcting her, but the effort would certainly be doomed to failure. Who, he thought, is the burden at this table?
“I should have named you Konstantin,” she said. “That means ‘constant,’ ‘reliable.’ I could have called you Kolya. Instead I named you Sasha. Do you know what your name means?”
“ ‘Defender of men,’ ” he said. “You have told me this hundreds of times. ‘Defender of men.’ ”
“ ‘Defender of hens’?” she said.
“Where are your hearing aids?” he asked, pointing to both of his ears.
“Too loud,” she said. “I hear well enough. You are changing the subject. Like your father. You are changing the subject. Is it any wonder poor Maya left you?”
“None,” he said. “None at all. Have a good trip to Kiev.”
“You are missing two bodies, maybe more,” Paulinin said to Emil Karpo, who sat across from him under the bright lights of the laboratory.
They sat at the scientist’s desk, space on which had been cleared to hold the two mugs of almost black, almost boiling tea in front of them. The laboratory smelled of fetid decay from the two bodies on the table about a dozen feet behind Emil Karpo.
“I have looked at all you have brought me so far,” Paulinin said, taking a sip of tea.
His glasses steamed. He removed them and placed them carefully on the desk.
“And you have discovered?” Karpo prodded.
“Bodies in a state of unseemly deterioration. The homeless are treated with as little respect when they die as when they lived. However, I did learn some things.”
Paulinin drank some more tea. This time Karpo waited patiently.
“Two of the dead were not the victims of your Maniac. Copycat. Buried hastily in the park, heads crushed from behind, but not by a hammer, by a metal pipe or rod. The killer of those two, killed within a few days of each other, was taller, heavier, than your Maniac. When those murders were taking place, your Maniac was hitting harder and with greater efficiency, but the leap in murderous quality is too abrupt. It should be more gradual, which leads me to believe—”
“That there are some bodies we have not yet discovered,” said Karpo, looking over the mug in his hand.
“The dolts who were in charge of the case before you took over missed this and, I am certain, missed much more.”
“Can you tell what time of day each victim was killed?”
“Ah, good question. Stomach contents. Most of these victims lived on vodka or cheap wine, but the contents of the stomachs with food suggest they were killed at night. But you knew that. Our Maniac would be unlikely to strike in the gray light of day.”
That was Karpo’s theory. More than fifty people, all killed at night. What if the Maniac could only kill at night because he worked during the day? Karpo had already told this to Porfiry Petrovich, who had not been the least bit surprised.
Paulinin had supplied Rostnikov and Karpo with information about how tall the Maniac was and that he was right-handed and urged his victims to drink Nitin wine while he indulged in guava juice. More would come.
“Where is Porfiry Petrovich?” asked Paulinin, putting his glasses back on.
“In Bitsevsky Park.”
“Searching for more bodies?”
“I believe he is walking the pathways, sitting on the benches, and watching the chess players.”
“In other words, he is working,” said Paulinin.
“Yes,” said Karpo.
“You are going to look for the copycats?”
“Of course.”
“Becker at Moscow University has run their DNA. They do not appear in the files and I doubt if they themselves were homeless.”
Karpo knew the dead men as Numbers 30 and 31. There had been several differences from the other victims of the Maniac and these two. Numbers 30 and 31 had been buried more deeply than the others. While a number of the victims had little or no identification, none appeared to have been robbed and all had something in their pockets, slip of paper, an appointment card, something. These two had been stripped of everything. This had been attributed to nothing more than a slight deviation in pattern for
the Maniac. After all, he was mad.
“And?” asked Karpo, sensing that Paulinin had something more to tell.
“Fingerprint,” he said. “In spite of decomposition. In spite of pitiful irreverence for the dead, I managed to retrieve a fingerprint from the jacket of one of the two victims.”
Paulinin reached over on his desk to pick up a thin, square white envelope. He handed it to Karpo, who put it in his jacket pocket.
Before the end of the day, Emil Karpo would identify both of the copycat victims, discover that they had disappeared leaving everything behind, which included not very much, for their niece, the daughter of their long dead sister. The niece, who believed herself very clever, broke down after being interrogated by Karpo in a room at Petrovka.
Thus, two of the murders attributed to the Maniac were solved, leaving only approximately fifty more that were the work of the still-unidentified Maniac.
7
A Prince of Industry Plays with Fire
Pavel Petrov met Iris Templeton in the lobby of the office building not far from Red Square. He was a bit heavier than when last she had seen him, but he was still handsome and smiling. His suit, Iris could tell, was Italian and almost certainly custom-made.
“I am very glad you could come,” he said in English, taking her extended right hand and holding it in both of his. “You look as lovely as when last we met at the Trade Congress in Belgrade in 1994.”
“You have been well briefed,” she said.
Petrov shrugged and said, “I confess. Come.”
He led her across the lobby, which included a desk for two uniformed guards and a smattering of well-placed pots with plants sprouting large succulent green leaves. Somewhere a voice, probably in conversation on a telephone, echoed through the lobby and remained with them until the elevator doors closed behind Iris and Petrov.
“Are you enjoying Moscow this visit?”
“I have only been here one day and one night,” she said as the elevator slowly rose.
“And I trust you have been well treated night and day by the members of our incorruptible Office of Special Investigations?”
“Yes,” she said.
A Whisper to the Living (Inspector Rostnikov Mysteries) Page 10